Harukawa draws big-assed dominant women sitting on the faces of skinny subservient men. His drawings depict ye ancient art of “facesitting”—which probably doesn’t need any more explaining than that. Some of his erotic drawings (not included here) go beyond the smothering power games of facesitting, and its associated acts of cunnilingus and anilingus, into coprophilia and urolagnia.

His large, voluptuous women are amazonian, Robert Crumbesque goddesses. They are aloof, indifferent to the plight of the men (quite literally) beneath them. They smoke cigarettes, drink wine, talk on the phone, or read books. These women are utterly in control. The men only exist to service their needs. The men are weak, puny, almost asexual, but willing submit to their mistresses’ needs.

For an artist who produces such powerful and subversive art, it’s rather surprising to find there is only a small amount of biographical detail about him on the Internet. Some pages claim he is dead. Some that he is still alive. There is even a dispute over his age. One Wikipedia entry has him born in 1932, while another Wikipedia page claims he was born in January 1947, in the Osaka Prefecture. Whatever the facts about this elusive and mysterious artist, his work has grown from underground cult status in the 1960s to a small but reverential international market.